All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park, reviewed by John Crowley

New York: Tor Books, 2014; $25.99 hc; 272 pages

I very much hope that Paul Park’s new novel, All Those Vanished Engines, will appear in paperback, so that the praise I was planning to lavish on it (and will lavish on it) might be deployed on the back or front of it—though I can’t say how many new readers it will draw to the book. I apologize also to the readers of this journal for being so behindhand with my review, which I promised for long ago. I actually lost the book for quite a while, after having read (actually reread) about half of it in preparation for this notice. It seemed impossible to go on if I couldn’t find the book to quote from, whose pages I could flip through and note my markings of passages, my exclamation points and queries (often appearing together).

The book at length did turn up again, stashed oddly with all the other Paul Park titles I possess, and I started in again—from the beginning, as this is not the sort of book you can just sort of pick up the thread after an absence, recollect the characters and story, and then go on. My metaphor would be that of a large and many-piece jigsaw puzzle, maybe one of those with a picture on both sides, which you begin, find the border pieces etc., leave and return to, put in a piece or pieces and then depart from, only to return later. Like that, except that this is a jigsaw puzzle that needed to be pieced together by memory rather than any spatial sense; to figure out the placement of any piece you have to remember the entire story you have read and all the slight variations of this particular theme or meme to know where in the order of time to place it.

It is possible that the readership of the book consists of those as fully aware of Paul Park’s life history and his works, as his immediate family is—not only because so many of the narrative threads are drawn out of his own life but because so many aren’t, and it’s impossible to recognize the one without then matching it to the other: the true biographical detail and the invented opposite of it. Scholars now research the life of James Joyce or Marcel Proust and trace the supposed originals of every character named, every address visited in Dublin or Paris, every proper name, in order to decipher the code the author devised to hide his own life within. This is, of course, a dreadful and fatuous way to read a novel like Ulysses or Swann’s Way, which are actually a reflection of how the author escaped from the factuality (is that a word? Well, it is now) of his temporal existence to create something literarily transcendent. I don’t believe, however, that this is how we should or must read Park’s book. I believe that it can only exist as a variant of a lived life. It may be that I only read it that way because I know enough about the man and his circumstances to see at least some of where he departs from his life to make his story, and whenever I do, I experience a sort of sublimity of invention that couldn’t be achieved any other way.

You will have noticed I have said not a word about what these factualities/inventions might be. I haven’t told you anything about the contents of the book. I find it hard to bring myself to do so because any incident or circumstance in the book that I might describe has its ghost behind it, and though I may be able to perceive some or many of these, I am sure that I don’t perceive many others, and what I write would give only a pale idea of what is in the book, not only in large but in nearly every sentence of it. It would be like asking you to run your hand over a contour map and asking you to feel the rise and fall of the land, the peaks and valleys, and learn how interesting they all are.

All right: here are a couple of those threads. One concerns a huge, abandoned factory of the Sprague Electric Company near “Paul Park”’s house. It appears that this factory once embarked on a secret wartime project to manufacture potent sounds that could be used as weaponry and win the war—like a weirdly misguided Manhattan Project. The vast engines that would have produced the sounds (and which had the ancillary effect of growing huge flowers in a nearby garden) are described by a dying engineer in a nursing home, whose story “Paul Park” elicits. After transcribing his (ambiguous) testimony, “Park” continues thusly: “And here’s the larger construct or construction: Shortly after my mother’s death I wrote the copy for a sound installation, part of a new permanent exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, Massachusetts. The actual artist was a man named Stephen Vitello.” This is indeed actual, Vitello is actual, the museum is actual, it is the old Sprague Electric works with its titanic machinery, Paul Park lives in North Adams, and you can visit the permanent exhibition he contributed to. Whether this can be construed as the larger construct, or if the secret sound weapon project is in fact the larger, is only a tiny instance of the complexities at work.

Another that might intrigue certain readers of this journal is the play that Park makes of a Dungeons and Dragons novel that “Paul Park” writes, called The Rose of Sarifal, an entry in the Forgotten Realms area or branch of the D&D universe. Park did indeed write such a novel and did name the hero after his son; but whether the incidents in the novel (RoS) are identical to the incidents from the novel quoted in the novel (ATVE) I do not have the heart to discover. Decoders of the novel ATVE will want to read the novel RoS and learn.

About the truly remote and outlandish parts of the book—a story of alien invasions taking place at the time of the Civil War and paying off in the near future, in which various actual and sort of actual (I’m guessing) members of the many-branched and populous Park, Parke, and Claiborne families take villainous or heroic parts to save humanity—I will say only that they are deeply satisfying in themselves, and as the glamour of the metafiction surrounds and enlarges them, their struggles and fates become ever less weirdly Gothic and more full of the pathos of “Paul Park”’s efforts to save himself. Like Joyce’s efforts on Leopold Bloom’s behalf—deploying every weird stylistic and rhetorical device he can by main strength come up with—Paul Park’s efforts on “Paul Park”’s behalf have a greatly brave conclusion that leaves everything finally in doubt. Where else? Let’s be clear: there is nothing like this in sf or in fantastic literature properly so called; it is a wild departure, finely made, serious and willful and comic, self-effacing even in the act of self-exploitation. Don’t be afraid. Read it.

One further note: There are a few writers of fantasy and science fiction who can be said to carry not only an individual and instantly recognizable style but who can create worlds, characters, and circumstances at will by the swiftness and certainty of that style. In much of fantasy and sf, such a power is less important; Tolkien’s unexceptionable high-table language isn’t important, his visions are; Isaac Asimov was a great projector and a barely adequate writer. Park is one of a handful—I’d adduce J.G. Ballard and William Gibson—in whom we can feel the force of thought creating worlds in words, strong sure voices calm in a blizzard of self-generated weirdness. I can hear it in any one of his sentences, from Soldiers of Paradise on.

John Crowley lives in Western Massachusetts.